Jennifer Baka
Biographic Data
| ID | 1340697 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Baka |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Baka |
| SIGNATURE | BAKA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3046-5039 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 223 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Stencil adventures: Learning from political ecology to advance energy justice
This commentary engages Festus Boamah's article calling to ‘discipline’ energy justice (EJ) scholarship more centrally in human geography. While I commend the ambition and provocation of the article, I raise several cautions about attempting to house EJ in a specific discipline, geography or otherwise. Rather than disciplining EJ, I recommend that EJ can learn from the experiences of political ecology, which is a heterogenous community of practic…
Arrayed relations and runoff regulations: Stormwater governance and the hydrosocial territorialization of Pennsylvania grid-scale solar development
Solar photovoltaics are crucial technologies for purposive low-carbon energy transition, yet there is uneven oversight of the development of grid-scale solar facilities around the US. Where other forms of regulation are absent, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) construction site permitting programs may take a prominent role in governing solar development. In this paper, we use the lens of hydrosocial territorialization to re…
Recognizing senses of place in just energy transitions: Insights from rural Pennsylvania solar development
Senses of place compose a spectrum of flexibility to grid-scale solar development. • Misrecognition, related to private property rights, impedes place-based transitions. • Just transitions contend with relationship between recognition and sense of place. Renewable energy development that is compatible with local senses of place where it is built is thought to be an optimal way to pursue place-based energy transition. However, this is contingent u…
Hardening and Hollowing Out Private Property: Rentiership, Dispossession, and Planetary Extraction in the Marcellus Shale
Southwestern Pennsylvania (SWPA) has long been an energy extractive periphery, continuously remade through cycles of dispossession and accumulation. Here we examine the changing dynamics of private property in these cycles and its central role in the latest phase of extraction—unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). Drawing from literature on extractive dispossessions and rent circulation, we argue that UOGD has resulted in the “hardening …
An anatomy of inscrutability of the unconventional oil and gas development-water-health nexus in Pennsylvania
Legitimating grid-scale solar: Shaping Pennsylvania’s farmland as a renewable energy landscape
Cracking Appalachia: A Political-Industrial Ecology Perspective
This article presents a political-industrial ecology (PIE) analysis of a petrochemical ethane cracker plant located above the Marcellus Shale basin near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The analysis is motivated by community concerns that the cracker is more than just a plant and that current regulatory practices render the broader petrochemical ecosystem within which the plant exists largely unknowable. By integrating theory and methods from urban poli…
Stacked energyscapes: Conceptualizing fossil fuel and renewable energy entanglements in low-carbon transitions
Energy transitions are often characterized as discrete progressions away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, typically in different geographic spaces, which result in “winning” and “losing” communities. Policies have been enacted to encourage renewable energy investment in “losing” fossil fuel extractive communities. Such conceptualizations do not sufficiently consider how fossil fuel extraction and renewable energy intersect with and shape ea…
Influence in the right-of-way: Assessing landowners’ risk decision-making in negotiating oil and gas pipeline easements
Mining, loss, and despair: Exploring energy transitions and opioid use in an Appalachian coal community
Just energy imaginaries? Examining realities of solar development on Pennsylvania's farmland
Regenerative landscape design: An Integrative Framework to Enhance Sustainability Planning
Addressing contemporary environmental and social crises requires solutions-based, systems-level changes. To achieve these changes, transdisciplinary research approaches are needed to align problem framing with solution deployment at landscape scales. However, practical frameworks to guide this work are lacking. Here we propose a new framework to help bridge this gap: regenerative landscape design (RLD). We define RLD as a process for finding patt…
Unruly Mountains: Hydropower assemblages and geological surprises in the Indian Himalayas
Despite a decades long push to develop what is seen as the vast untapped hydropower potential of the Indian Himalayas, hydropower capacity addition has been delayed and become increasingly expensive in India. Policy documents cite "poor" geology as a major reason for these delays. As hydropower in the form of run-of-river projects expand into the Himalayas, their construction activities encounter poor geology more frequently. This paper analyses …
Disclosing Influence: Hydraulic fracturing, interest groups, and state policy processes in the United States
The evolving borderland of energy geographies
Energy geographers have characterized energy as a borderland topic because of its ability to straddle and interconnect different geographic concepts and debates. In this review, we evaluate how the borderland of energy geographies has been emerging in recent years by analyzing scholarship on energy published in top geography journals and a leading energy studies journal, Energy Research & Social Science . In part 1 of our review, we evaluate how …
Environmental Knowledge Cartographies: Evaluating Competing Discourses in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Rule-Making
In this article, we evaluate competing environmental knowledge claims in U.S. hydraulic fracturing (HF) regulation. We conduct a case study of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) rule-making process over the period from 2012 to 2015, which was the first attempt to update federal oil and gas regulations in thirty years. Our study addresses a gap in the energy geographies and environmental governance literatures, which have yet to evaluate system…
Agenda‐Setting at the Energy‐Water Nexus: Constructing and Maintaining a Policy Monopoly in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation
Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the U.S. Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long‐standing “policy monopoly”: a form of stability in policy agenda‐setting in which a specific manner of framing and regulating a policy issue becomes hegemonic. Integrating theories on agenda‐setting …
Can shareholder advocacy shape energy governance? The case of the US antifracking movement
Research on socially responsible investing (SRI) and investor-led governance, especially in the climate sector, suggests that shareholders adopt social movement tactics to influence corporate governance, including building networks, engaging directly with corporations and lobbying regulators. Further, research on corporate transparency and financial disclosure has proliferated, notably in the extractives sector. Our work builds on these existing …
Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions
This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and commun…
Political-industrial ecology: An introduction
Wasteland energy-scapes: A comparative energy flow analysis of India’s biofuel and biomass economies
What wastelands? A critique of biofuel policy discourse in South India
The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India
Through a micro-level study of a biofuel-related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state-subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of 'wasteland' and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has…
Constructing Sustainable Biofuels: Governance of the Emerging Biofuel Economy
In recent decades, new modes of governance have emerged in which an array of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs) drive norms and behaviors related to the production and consumption of goods and services with potentially large environmental and social impacts. These modes of governance are evident in the governance of biofuels, where intergovernmental organizations, national and subnational governments, corporations, and civil society organizations ha…
The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India
Through a micro-level study of a biofuel-related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state-subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of 'wasteland' and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has…
What wastelands? A critique of biofuel policy discourse in South India
Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions
This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and commun…
Constructing Sustainable Biofuels: Governance of the Emerging Biofuel Economy
In recent decades, new modes of governance have emerged in which an array of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs) drive norms and behaviors related to the production and consumption of goods and services with potentially large environmental and social impacts. These modes of governance are evident in the governance of biofuels, where intergovernmental organizations, national and subnational governments, corporations, and civil society organizations ha…
The evolving borderland of energy geographies
Energy geographers have characterized energy as a borderland topic because of its ability to straddle and interconnect different geographic concepts and debates. In this review, we evaluate how the borderland of energy geographies has been emerging in recent years by analyzing scholarship on energy published in top geography journals and a leading energy studies journal, Energy Research & Social Science . In part 1 of our review, we evaluate how …
Political-industrial ecology: An introduction
Wasteland energy-scapes: A comparative energy flow analysis of India’s biofuel and biomass economies
Just energy imaginaries? Examining realities of solar development on Pennsylvania's farmland
Can shareholder advocacy shape energy governance? The case of the US antifracking movement
Research on socially responsible investing (SRI) and investor-led governance, especially in the climate sector, suggests that shareholders adopt social movement tactics to influence corporate governance, including building networks, engaging directly with corporations and lobbying regulators. Further, research on corporate transparency and financial disclosure has proliferated, notably in the extractives sector. Our work builds on these existing …
Environmental Knowledge Cartographies: Evaluating Competing Discourses in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Rule-Making
In this article, we evaluate competing environmental knowledge claims in U.S. hydraulic fracturing (HF) regulation. We conduct a case study of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) rule-making process over the period from 2012 to 2015, which was the first attempt to update federal oil and gas regulations in thirty years. Our study addresses a gap in the energy geographies and environmental governance literatures, which have yet to evaluate system…
Stacked energyscapes: Conceptualizing fossil fuel and renewable energy entanglements in low-carbon transitions
Energy transitions are often characterized as discrete progressions away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, typically in different geographic spaces, which result in “winning” and “losing” communities. Policies have been enacted to encourage renewable energy investment in “losing” fossil fuel extractive communities. Such conceptualizations do not sufficiently consider how fossil fuel extraction and renewable energy intersect with and shape ea…
Unruly Mountains: Hydropower assemblages and geological surprises in the Indian Himalayas
Despite a decades long push to develop what is seen as the vast untapped hydropower potential of the Indian Himalayas, hydropower capacity addition has been delayed and become increasingly expensive in India. Policy documents cite "poor" geology as a major reason for these delays. As hydropower in the form of run-of-river projects expand into the Himalayas, their construction activities encounter poor geology more frequently. This paper analyses …
Legitimating grid-scale solar: Shaping Pennsylvania’s farmland as a renewable energy landscape
Cracking Appalachia: A Political-Industrial Ecology Perspective
This article presents a political-industrial ecology (PIE) analysis of a petrochemical ethane cracker plant located above the Marcellus Shale basin near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The analysis is motivated by community concerns that the cracker is more than just a plant and that current regulatory practices render the broader petrochemical ecosystem within which the plant exists largely unknowable. By integrating theory and methods from urban poli…
Agenda‐Setting at the Energy‐Water Nexus: Constructing and Maintaining a Policy Monopoly in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation
Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the U.S. Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long‐standing “policy monopoly”: a form of stability in policy agenda‐setting in which a specific manner of framing and regulating a policy issue becomes hegemonic. Integrating theories on agenda‐setting …
Mining, loss, and despair: Exploring energy transitions and opioid use in an Appalachian coal community
Disclosing Influence: Hydraulic fracturing, interest groups, and state policy processes in the United States
An anatomy of inscrutability of the unconventional oil and gas development-water-health nexus in Pennsylvania
Influence in the right-of-way: Assessing landowners’ risk decision-making in negotiating oil and gas pipeline easements
Regenerative landscape design: An Integrative Framework to Enhance Sustainability Planning
Addressing contemporary environmental and social crises requires solutions-based, systems-level changes. To achieve these changes, transdisciplinary research approaches are needed to align problem framing with solution deployment at landscape scales. However, practical frameworks to guide this work are lacking. Here we propose a new framework to help bridge this gap: regenerative landscape design (RLD). We define RLD as a process for finding patt…
Constructing Sustainable Biofuels: Governance of the Emerging Biofuel Economy
In recent decades, new modes of governance have emerged in which an array of non-nation-state actors (NNSAs) drive norms and behaviors related to the production and consumption of goods and services with potentially large environmental and social impacts. These modes of governance are evident in the governance of biofuels, where intergovernmental organizations, national and subnational governments, corporations, and civil society organizations ha…
What wastelands? A critique of biofuel policy discourse in South India
The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India
Through a micro-level study of a biofuel-related land acquisition in rural Tamil Nadu, India, this article reveals how state-subject relations are shaping modern land deal politics. Through its political construction of the concept of 'wasteland' and its associated wasteland development programme, the Indian state has facilitated a series of questionable land acquisitions, reshaping agrarian livelihoods in the process. A class of land brokers has…
Wasteland energy-scapes: A comparative energy flow analysis of India’s biofuel and biomass economies
Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development, Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions
This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and commun…
Political-industrial ecology: An introduction
Agenda‐Setting at the Energy‐Water Nexus: Constructing and Maintaining a Policy Monopoly in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation
Despite calls to increase federal oversight of hydraulic fracturing (HF), the U.S. Congress has maintained a regulatory system in which environmental regulatory authority is devolved to the states. We argue that this system is characterized by a long‐standing “policy monopoly”: a form of stability in policy agenda‐setting in which a specific manner of framing and regulating a policy issue becomes hegemonic. Integrating theories on agenda‐setting …
Can shareholder advocacy shape energy governance? The case of the US antifracking movement
Research on socially responsible investing (SRI) and investor-led governance, especially in the climate sector, suggests that shareholders adopt social movement tactics to influence corporate governance, including building networks, engaging directly with corporations and lobbying regulators. Further, research on corporate transparency and financial disclosure has proliferated, notably in the extractives sector. Our work builds on these existing …
Environmental Knowledge Cartographies: Evaluating Competing Discourses in U.S. Hydraulic Fracturing Rule-Making
In this article, we evaluate competing environmental knowledge claims in U.S. hydraulic fracturing (HF) regulation. We conduct a case study of the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) rule-making process over the period from 2012 to 2015, which was the first attempt to update federal oil and gas regulations in thirty years. Our study addresses a gap in the energy geographies and environmental governance literatures, which have yet to evaluate system…
Disclosing Influence: Hydraulic fracturing, interest groups, and state policy processes in the United States
The evolving borderland of energy geographies
Energy geographers have characterized energy as a borderland topic because of its ability to straddle and interconnect different geographic concepts and debates. In this review, we evaluate how the borderland of energy geographies has been emerging in recent years by analyzing scholarship on energy published in top geography journals and a leading energy studies journal, Energy Research & Social Science . In part 1 of our review, we evaluate how …
Unruly Mountains: Hydropower assemblages and geological surprises in the Indian Himalayas
Despite a decades long push to develop what is seen as the vast untapped hydropower potential of the Indian Himalayas, hydropower capacity addition has been delayed and become increasingly expensive in India. Policy documents cite "poor" geology as a major reason for these delays. As hydropower in the form of run-of-river projects expand into the Himalayas, their construction activities encounter poor geology more frequently. This paper analyses …
Influence in the right-of-way: Assessing landowners’ risk decision-making in negotiating oil and gas pipeline easements
Mining, loss, and despair: Exploring energy transitions and opioid use in an Appalachian coal community
Just energy imaginaries? Examining realities of solar development on Pennsylvania's farmland
Regenerative landscape design: An Integrative Framework to Enhance Sustainability Planning
Addressing contemporary environmental and social crises requires solutions-based, systems-level changes. To achieve these changes, transdisciplinary research approaches are needed to align problem framing with solution deployment at landscape scales. However, practical frameworks to guide this work are lacking. Here we propose a new framework to help bridge this gap: regenerative landscape design (RLD). We define RLD as a process for finding patt…
Stacked energyscapes: Conceptualizing fossil fuel and renewable energy entanglements in low-carbon transitions
Energy transitions are often characterized as discrete progressions away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, typically in different geographic spaces, which result in “winning” and “losing” communities. Policies have been enacted to encourage renewable energy investment in “losing” fossil fuel extractive communities. Such conceptualizations do not sufficiently consider how fossil fuel extraction and renewable energy intersect with and shape ea…
An anatomy of inscrutability of the unconventional oil and gas development-water-health nexus in Pennsylvania
Legitimating grid-scale solar: Shaping Pennsylvania’s farmland as a renewable energy landscape
Cracking Appalachia: A Political-Industrial Ecology Perspective
This article presents a political-industrial ecology (PIE) analysis of a petrochemical ethane cracker plant located above the Marcellus Shale basin near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The analysis is motivated by community concerns that the cracker is more than just a plant and that current regulatory practices render the broader petrochemical ecosystem within which the plant exists largely unknowable. By integrating theory and methods from urban poli…
Stencil adventures: Learning from political ecology to advance energy justice
This commentary engages Festus Boamah's article calling to ‘discipline’ energy justice (EJ) scholarship more centrally in human geography. While I commend the ambition and provocation of the article, I raise several cautions about attempting to house EJ in a specific discipline, geography or otherwise. Rather than disciplining EJ, I recommend that EJ can learn from the experiences of political ecology, which is a heterogenous community of practic…
Arrayed relations and runoff regulations: Stormwater governance and the hydrosocial territorialization of Pennsylvania grid-scale solar development
Solar photovoltaics are crucial technologies for purposive low-carbon energy transition, yet there is uneven oversight of the development of grid-scale solar facilities around the US. Where other forms of regulation are absent, National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) construction site permitting programs may take a prominent role in governing solar development. In this paper, we use the lens of hydrosocial territorialization to re…
Recognizing senses of place in just energy transitions: Insights from rural Pennsylvania solar development
Senses of place compose a spectrum of flexibility to grid-scale solar development. • Misrecognition, related to private property rights, impedes place-based transitions. • Just transitions contend with relationship between recognition and sense of place. Renewable energy development that is compatible with local senses of place where it is built is thought to be an optimal way to pursue place-based energy transition. However, this is contingent u…
Hardening and Hollowing Out Private Property: Rentiership, Dispossession, and Planetary Extraction in the Marcellus Shale
Southwestern Pennsylvania (SWPA) has long been an energy extractive periphery, continuously remade through cycles of dispossession and accumulation. Here we examine the changing dynamics of private property in these cycles and its central role in the latest phase of extraction—unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). Drawing from literature on extractive dispossessions and rent circulation, we argue that UOGD has resulted in the “hardening …
Economics (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Ecology (7 works) · Energy and Environment Impacts (7 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (6 works)